I think 25 percent (12.5 male, 12.5 female) of the people between the ages of 18-24 should be sufficient.
No exemptions for college students. If you are able to hold an AK-47 and your number is called, then you go to Baghdad. It’s that simple.
It won’t win us the war in Iraq. That was lost as soon as a few stupid soldiers thought it was a good idea to take photos of naked Iraqis with dog leashes around their necks.
But it would do something else that our generation most desperately needs: a wake-up call from a thing called reality.
A few weeks ago I was having lunch with my grandma when the conversation turned to Iraq. She asked why it was that my generation seemed so disinterested, either way, about the war.
I fumbled the question and said something like, “Well, you know Grandma, our generation is very distracted, we have all these different technologies coming at us every which way, and well, it’s not that we don’t care, it’s just that … um … we’re just preoccupied I guess.”
It was a bullshit answer. In retrospect, what I should have said was, “At our core we are good people, but we are the most selfish group of individuals the world has ever seen.”
Think about this. While we buy our lattés, flock to MySpace and spend triple digits on footwear, nearly one-sixth of the world’s population is starving and doesn’t have access to clean water, which leads to five to eight million deaths a year from something as simple (and disgusting) as diarrhea.
There isn’t anything wrong with buying over-priced coffee, updating your profile or having nice shoes, but there is something wrong with not taking advantage of our privileges and helping out people that weren’t lucky enough to be born in California.
We rarely even discuss things that don’t affect ourselves. Think about how many discussions you have a day when the main topic isn’t about you, the person you are talking to, how annoying your professors are or how the Outpost is such a rip-off.
Every now and then, we do things that make us think we care about things other than ourselves. Maybe we go to a protest, or volunteer once a year, or buy “An Inconvenient Truth” on DVD, or write an opinion column. But we do these things, not in hopes of making the world a better place, but to tell ourselves, “Wow, I am such a great person, look what I did.”
I’m afraid that our sense of reality has become so twisted that there is little hope of us just magically caring about the fallout of the Sunni-Shiite crisis more than we care about how cute baby Suri is.
Therefore, drastic measures are called for. We need the draft and we need it now.
The day we start caring about the world outside of our bubble is the day liberal studies majors start dying in Al Anbar province.
I know that sounds cold, but if we are choosing to live in our own self-indulged make believe world, while the rest of the planet is falling apart, what’s the point of living anyway?
Patrick Creaven is a senior journalism major and the sports editor for the Daily Forty-Niner.
